Digital Commons Network^™

Family Acculturation And Asthma Outcomes In Latino Children, Tania M. Barreno

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Background: Asthma is the primary chronic disease diagnosed in children. California has had some of the highest asthma prevalence rates within the nation. The literature indicates that there is a poor understanding of asthma outcome and management. However, studies exploring the role of acculturation on such outcomes are limited. Thus, the goal of this research was to conduct a secondary analysis of the Child Questionnaire from the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS) 2007 and 2009 cross-sectional data to explore the determinants of asthma outcomes as it relates to family acculturation.

Methodology: The quantitative data were analyzed using Stata. Descriptive statistics, …

Cultural Consensus Model Of Depression Beliefs Among Afghan Refugees, Qais Alemi

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

This study describes gender-specific beliefs about depression among Afghan refugees, a population shown to be highly distressed. A 73-item questionnaire covering causes, symptoms, and treatments of depression, developed through free-listing techniques and supplemented with items from existing scales, was administered to a non-random sample of 50 men and 43 women in San Diego County. Demographic information and data on baseline distress levels were also collected. The Cultural Consensus Model was used to estimate the culturally correct answer for each question, and to assess the proportion of shared beliefs within and between groups. Results from consensus analysis indicated a homogenous response …

Simpatia And Perceptions Of Healthcare Mistreatment Among Latino And Anglo Women, Andres Gilberto Mendez

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Past research has examined perceptions of mistreatment in the context of healthcare professional-patient relationships, but the majority of the literature has focused primarily on racial and ethnic differences. Guided by Betancourt's Model for the Study of Culture, the aim of this research was to examine the role of culture and its association with perceptions of healthcare mistreatment among Latino and Anglo women. Specifically, this study investigated ethnic differences in perceptions of healthcare mistreatment through the investigation of simpatía, a cultural script that stresses interpersonal harmony and personal characteristics such as being likeable and easy going. The study also found ethnic …

Stress, Depression, Quality Of Life, And Language Recovery In Constraint Induced Aphasia Therapy (Ciat), Brian Sharp

Loma Linda University Electronic Theses, Dissertations & Projects

Traditional aphasia treatment approaches focus initially on restoration of language, but quickly move to use of alternative modes of communication when progress is slow. Constraint Induced Aphasia Therapy (CIAT), a more intensive form of treatment, is based on the concept of frequent, long sessions and forced use of the impaired language system. Prior to the present study, the relationship between CIAT and stress had not been explored; therefore, this study compared cortisol stress levels and improvement of language skills in two groups of subjects, all of whom presented with expressive aphasia. Ten subjects participated in CIAT, and received 10 days …

Understanding Common Perceptions From Online Social Media, Derek Doran, Swapna S. Gokhale, Aldo Dagnino

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Modern society habitually uses online social media services to publicly share observations, thoughts, opinions, and beliefs at any time and from any location. These geotagged social media posts may provide aggregate insights into people's perceptions on a bad range of topics across a given geographical area beyond what is currently possible through services such as Yelp and Foursquare. This paper develops probabilistic language models to investigate whether collective, topic-based perceptions within a geographical area can be extracted from the content of geotagged Twitter posts. The capability of the methodology is illustrated using tweets from three areas of different sizes. An …

Autodenominations: An Ethnographer’S Account From Peruvian Amazonia, Peter Gow

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

No abstract provided.

Mission, Food, And Commensality Among The Yukpa: Indigenous Creolization And Emerging Complexities In Indigenous Modernities, Ernst Halbmayer

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

No abstract provided.

Introduction: Indigenous Creolization, Amerindian Hybridity And The Invention Of Authenticity, Ernst Halbmayer, Catherine Alès

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

No abstract provided.

Would Women Leaders Have Prevented The Global Financial Crisis? Teaching Critical Thinking By Questioning A Question, Julie A. Nelson

Economics Faculty Publication Series

Would having more women in leadership have prevented the financial crisis? This question, raised in the popular media, can make effective fodder for teaching critical thinking within courses such as gender and economics, money and financial institutions, pluralist economics, or behavioural economics. While the question, as posed, demands an answer of 'Yes - sex differences in traits are important' or 'No - gender is irrelevant', students can be encouraged to question the question itself. The first part of this essay briefly reviews literature on the sameness-versus-difference debate, noting that the belief in exaggerated behavioural differences between men and women is …

Practicum Projects, Michael P. Johnson

Public Policy and Public Affairs Faculty Publication Series

Executive Summary LIFT-Boston, a local non-profit organization, entered into a collaborative partnership in September 2012 with McCormack Graduate School Public Policy Ph.D. students and faculty to develop and execute a research project. The goals of this endeavor were to assist LIFT-Boston in understanding the outcomes associated with its services and enable the organization to further pursue service goals. The primary research questions respond to the organization’s most fundamental questions. These include how the organization’s unique service model impacts clients across several objective and subjective dimensions of well-being. Secondary questions focus on how these impacts may translate into increases or decreases …

Bullying Prevalence In Mississippi: A Comparison Of Urban And Rural Schools, Valarie Mccaskill

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

This study examines the prevalence of bullying in urban and rural schools in Mississippi. Students at eight middle schools completed the Olweus Bully/Victim Questionnaire to identify bullies and bully victims. The results of the study showed that approximately 50% of students in both urban and rural schools were identified as being bullied once or more during the current school term. There was no significant difference in the prevalence of bullying at urban and rural schools based on students who attended the eight middle schools who participated in the study. However, there was a significant difference in the prevalence of bullying …

Demo: Sociophone: Everyday Face-To-Face Interaction Monitoring Platform Using Multi-Phone Sensor Fusion, Youngki Lee, Chulhong Min, Chanyou Hwang, Jaeung Lee, Inseok Hwang, Younghyun Ju, Chungkuk Yoo, Miri Moon, Uichin Lee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this demo, we introduce SocioPhone, a novel initiative toward everyday face-to-face interaction monitoring platform. Among diverse verbal, aural, visual cues expressed during face-to-face interaction, SocioPhone captures diverse meta-linguistic information from conversations and provides interaction-aware applications on-the-fly. Undoubtedly, conversations are a key channel for face-to-face interaction. Specifically, monitoring conversational turns, i.e., alternation of different speakers (including none speaking), is the first crucial step to derive diverse interesting aspects of conversations, e.g., who is talking right now, how long and often one talks, how quickly one responds to another, and so on. In this demo, we will show the core technique …

Sociophone: Everyday Face-To-Face Interaction Monitoring Platform Using Multi-Phone Sensor Fusion, Youngki Lee, Chulhong Min, Chanyou Hwang, Jaeung Lee, Inseok Hwang, Younghyun Ju, Chungkuk Yoo, Miri Moon, Uichin Lee, Junehwa Song

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In this paper, we propose SocioPhone, a novel initiative to build a mobile platform for face-to-face interaction monitoring. Face-to-face interaction, especially conversation, is a fundamental part of everyday life. Interaction-aware applications aimed at facilitating group conversations have been proposed, but have not proliferated yet. Useful contexts to capture and support face-to-face interactions need to be explored more deeply. More important, recognizing delicate conversational contexts with commodity mobile devices requires solving a number of technical challenges. As a first step to address such challenges, we identify useful meta-linguistic contexts of conversation, such as turn-takings, prosodic features, a dominant participant, and pace. …

A Discursive Analysis Of A Pregnancy Center: How Pregnant Women Are Encouraged To Develop A Sense Of Self-Worth And Emotional Wellbeing Through The Use Of Rhetoric And Imagery, Jessica Postma

Masters Theses

This study presents and alternative approach to how pregnancy is interpreted in western society and how settings such as a pregnancy center both challenges and reinforces these social standards. The promotion of abstinence, the aversion to abortion, notions of truth and morality, religious narratives, and the standard of care are all integral components to this analysis of pregnancy, language, and culture.

The Roma And Wall Street/Ceos: Linguistic Construction Of Identity In U.S. And Canadian Crime Reports, Theresa Catalano

Department of Teaching, Learning, and Teacher Education: Faculty Publications

Discriminatory practices against Roma (also known as Romanies) occur on a daily basis in many countries around the world through media discourse. This paper investigates the representation of Romanies in U.S. and Canadian online newspaper crime reports and compares this representation to Wall Street/CEOs in crime reports demonstrating how identity of both groups is constructed through a variety of linguistic and non-linguistic strategies. Drawing on Mayr and Machin’s (2012) critical linguistic analysis of the language of crime, this multimodal study incorporates a variety of tools such as Critical Discourse Analysis and Cognitive Linguistics in order to dig below the surface …

Limited Admissibility And Its Limitations, Lisa Dufraimont

Articles & Book Chapters

Among the challenges facing juries and judges in adjudicating cases is the obligation to use evidence for limited purposes. Evidence inadmissible for one purpose is frequently admissible for other purposes, a situation known as "limited admissibility". Where limited admissibility arises in jury trials, courts generally deliver limiting instructions outlining the inferences that can legitimately be drawn from the evidence and identifying prohibited lines of reasoning to be avoided. Limiting instructions represent an expedient solution to limited-admissibility problems, but they create obvious problems of their own. A thoughtful observer might suspect-as psychological studies confirm-that limiting instructions are likely to fail in …

From The Editor's Desk [Theological Studies, June 2013], David G. Schultenover

Theology Faculty Research and Publications

No abstract provided.

Distributed Multichannel Speech Enhancement Based On Perceptually-Motivated Bayesian Estimators Of The Spectral Amplitude, Marek B. Trawicki, Michael T. Johnson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Research and Publications

In this study, the authors propose multichannel weighted Euclidean (WE) and weighted cosh (WCOSH) cost function estimators for speech enhancement in the distributed microphone scenario. The goal of the work is to illustrate the advantages of utilising additional microphones and modified cost functions for improving signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) and segmental SNR (SSNR) along with log-likelihood ratio (LLR) and perceptual evaluation of speech quality (PESQ) objective metrics over the corresponding single-channel baseline estimators. As with their single-channel counterparts, the perceptually-motivated multichannel WE and WCOSH estimators are functions of a weighting law parameter, which influences attention of the noisy spectral amplitude through …

Substantial Connection: The Intersectionof Extraterritorial Jurisdiction And Constitutional Protections For Foreign National Contractors Serving With Or Accompanying U.S. Armed Forces, Joe D. Montenegro

Dickinson Law Review (1908-2003)

Every day, many foreign nationals place their lives in danger for the benefit of the United States while serving with U.S. Armed Forces in hostile environments. In United States v. Ali, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces held that a combat interpreter did not have a substantial connection, as envisioned under United States v. Verdugo- Urquidez, with the United States to entitle the interpreter to Fifth and Sixth Amendment protections. Although the result is likely correct given that U.S. service members prosecuted under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) are not entitled to the specific protections …

The Languages Of Amazonia, Patience Epps, Andrés Pablo Salanova

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

No abstract provided.

Systems Of Naming And Creolization: Authentic Acculturation And/Or Authentic Tradition? The Yanomami Case, Catherine Alès

Tipití: Journal of the Society for the Anthropology of Lowland South America

No abstract provided.

Regulating Shadows: Financial Regulation And Responsibility Failure , Steven L. Schwarcz

Washington and Lee Law Review

In the modern financial architecture, financial services and products increasingly are provided outside of the traditional banking system—and thus without the need for bank intermediation between capital markets and the users of funds. Most corporate financing, for example, no longer is dependent on bank loans but is raised through special-purpose entities, money- market mutual funds, securiti es lenders, hedge funds, and investment banks. This shift, referred to as “disintermediation” and described as creating a “shadow banking” system, is transforming finance so radically that regulatory scholars need to rethink their assumptions. Two of the fundamental market failures underlying shadow banking—information failure …

International Dateline-A Nest Of Singing Birds, Rita Ricketts

Against the Grain

No abstract provided.

Closing The Gap? Persistent Underperformance Of Black Minorities In Former Whites-Only Sa Schools, L. M. Dreyer, Sam Singh

Journal of Educational Leadership in Action

This paper is based on a study that explored the life experiences of Xhosa-speaking learners as a minority in a former whites-only school in the Western Cape province of South Africa. The focus was specifically on the factors that contribute to the continued poor academic performance of this minority group within the school. Identifying and understanding these factors as challenges to academic success can help teachers and schools provide appropriate support structures to maximize the potential of these learners. Research has shown that programs of support will only be effective if they appreciate and cater to the needs of the …

Obscurity By Design, Woodrow Hartzog, Frederic Stutzman

Washington Law Review

Design-based solutions to confront technological privacy threats are becoming popular with regulators. However, these promising solutions have left the full potential of design untapped. With respect to online communication technologies, design-based solutions for privacy remain incomplete because they have yet to successfully address the trickiest aspect of the Internet—social interaction. This Article posits that privacy-protection strategies such as “Privacy by Design” face unique challenges with regard to social software and social technology due to their interactional nature. This Article proposes that design-based solutions for social technologies benefit from increased attention to user interaction, with a focus on the principles of …

Explicit Teacher-Implemented Phoneme Awareness Instruction: Preschool Effects, Heather M. Osterhouse

Masters Theses

The purpose of the current study was to investigate the impact of explicit, concentrated, teacher-implemented phonological awareness instruction for ―at risk‖ 4- year-olds. Early childhood educators were trained to implement a 10-week program delivered for 20-minute sessions, four times a week, in their classrooms. The program focused on phonological awareness beginning at the level of letter-sound knowledge and advancing to blending and segmenting constituent phonemes in words. Pre- to post-treatment comparisons of phonological awareness and letter knowledge skills indicated that children in the experimental group made significant gains in comparison to the control group in phoneme blending and letter knowledge. …

Himmelfarb Library Liaison Letter - June 2013, George Washington University, Himmelfarb Health Sciences Library

Himmelfarb Library Liaison Letters

No abstract provided.

A Latent Variable Model For Viewpoint Discovery From Threaded Forum Posts, Minghui Qiu, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Threaded discussion forums provide an important social media platform. Its rich user generated content has served as an important source of public feedback. To automatically discover the viewpoints or stances on hot issues from forum threads is an important and useful task. In this paper, we propose a novel latent variable model for viewpoint discovery from threaded forum posts. Our model is a principled generative latent variable model which captures three important factors: viewpoint specific topic preference, user identity and user interactions. Evaluation results show that our model clearly outperforms a number of baseline models in terms of both clustering …

Mining User Relations From Online Discussions Using Sentiment Analysis And Probabilistic Matrix Factorization, Minghui Qiu, Liu Yang, Jing Jiang

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Advances in sentiment analysis have enabled extraction of user relations implied in online textual exchanges such as forum posts. However, recent studies in this direction only consider direct relation extraction from text. As user interactions can be sparse in online discussions, we propose to apply collaborative filtering through probabilistic matrix factorization to generalize and improve the opinion matrices extracted from forum posts. Experiments with two tasks show that the learned latent factor representation can give good performance on a relation polarity prediction task and improve the performance of a subgroup detection task.

Explore Global Opportunities For Mathematics Scholarship, Teaching, And Service, Ron Benbow

ACMS Conference Proceedings 2013

There are numerous overseas opportunities in which to apply your knowledge and interest in mathematics. These international experiences allow you to expand your scholarship, to extend your teaching skills, to offer professional services to K-12 teachers or other university instructors, and to provide much personal enrichment as well. Examples from recent professional experiences in Liberia, Haiti, Guatemala, and Ecuador will be shared to illustrate the connections to teaching, scholarship, and service. Information regarding MAA Study Tours, Fulbright Specialist grants, and other relevant organizations will be provided.